MDT FUNdamentals: Adding Office 2016 to MDT 2013

This one’s been something I’ve meaning to post for a while now, and it’s going to hopefully be part of a fun little series I want to call MDT FUNdamentals. In this article I will outline how to add a basic Office install to your deployment share.

One of my absolute favorite things about the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is the relative ease in which we can get it to install, configure and patch just about any version of MS Office for us. If you really wanted to, you could use this to install Office at deploy time, but for 99% of us out there, we’ll do this during the image build prior to Sysprep and capture.

This guide assumes a few things:
MDT 2013 Update 2 is installed.
ADK 10 is installed.

Now, what I won’t assume is that you have Office 2016 imported into your share. If you have an ISO, mount it, if you can’t mount it, extract it. Once that’s complete, this guide will show you how to add it.

First if you don’t already, you’ll need a share, an image, and a task sequence, don’t worry if you don’t have a custom image yet, you can use the wim in the iso. If you don’t have a share, you’ll need to create one. Remember, this is how I put Office in my image, I have MDT install it before I have MDT capture the image for me.

For this example, I’m going to add Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2016 to a share I use to build windows 10 images.

From the applications folder in your deployment share, right click and select new application. Point it to the mounted ISO or extracted ISO.

Office is easily added to MDT by importing the contents of the ISO. See below for the syntax. Once Office is imported, we’ll run the office customization tool. Create a new file, make your tweaks and save to the updates folder in the share.

Since we’re installing Pro setup.exe will need to be pointed to the proplus XML like above.

The MDT/Office integration is pretty solid. The most basic configs can be done here. Right click it once imported and select properties.

The Office Customization Tool is a powerful way to automate office install and tweak it for your needs.

The wizard also allows you to pick and choose which components. Skype? Who needs that? Not me.

The wizard’s prolly the safest way to add Office keys, well next to KMS that is.

Final trick: Use this setting to disable that first run wizard that NOBODY wants to see. Set this and thank me later.